Marilyn Strathern

This book challenges the routine ways in which anthropologists have thought about the complexity and quantity of their materials. Marilyn Strathern focuses on a problem normally regarded as commonplace: that of scale or proportion. She combines a wide-ranging interest in current theoretical issues with a minute attention to the cultural details of social life, attempting to conserve a sense of proportion between them. Strathern gives equal weight to two areas of contemporary debate. One concerns the writing of anthropology and the representation of societies where all lives seem complex, the other the future of cross-cultural comparison in a field where "too much" seems known. The ethnographic focus of this book, Melanesian anthropology, exemplifies the levels and contexts through which Melanesianists have managed the compexity of their own accounts while, at the same time, unfolding an indigenous commentary on proportion and the mixing of forms. She reveals unexpected replications in modes of thought and in the presentation of images that remain to be explained.

The societies of Melanesia have been a constant stimulus to anthropological theory. In this collection of essays, anthropologists who have worked in all parts of the Melanesian region of the Pacific bring their expertise to bear on a single theoretical issue. This is a hypothesis formulated by Maurice Godelier concerning the relationship between power, kinship and wealth. Although tightly focused on Godelier's work, the book opens up a major enquiry into the constitution of society in a part of the world where men of prominence come to personify the nature of power. 'Big men', entrepreneurs of exchanges, and 'great men', who flourish in societies characterised by restricted exchanges and ritual complexity, appear to belong to quite different systems. This book considers how substantial the difference between them really is.

In the most original and ambitious synthesis yet undertaken in Melanesian scholarship, Marilyn Strathern argues that gender relations have been a particular casualty of unexamined assumptions held by Western anthropologists and feminist scholars alike. The book treats with equal seriousness - and with equal good humor - the insights of Western social science, feminist politics, and ethnographic reporting, in order to rethink the representation of Melanesian social and cultural life. This makes "The Gender of the Gift" one of the most sustained critiques of cross-cultural comparison that anthropology has seen, and one of its most spirited vindications.